Patricia Piccininis Curious Imaginings immersive sculpture experience will exhibit in Vancouver this September as part of the 2018-2020 Vancouver Biennale. For the first time in the Biennales fifteen years of creating transformative experiences through public art, and in keeping with the 2018 â€“ 2020 theme of re-IMAGE-n, the exhibition will take over an interior space in the historic Patricia Hotel.

Mirror Mirror plumbs the relationship between identity, cultural norms, and representation. In the most abbreviated of forms, a portrait is a depiction of a person, usually a face, occasionally a torso, sometimes more of the body, or even a symbolic presentation of an aspect of an individualâ€™s character. The artists in the show have approached the subject of portraiture in a multitude of ways.

Exhibition featuring the collection of Tony Podesta, including Photography, sculpture, and mixed-media work. Curated by Klaus Ottman, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Academic Affairs at The Phillips Collection, and Jennifer Sakai, photographer and George Washington University Professor.

Mathematical precision, quantum physics, utopian worlds, body modification, internet dating and Instagram filters.
Why do humans strive for perfection?
Underpinned by the accuracy and precision of maths and physics, a wave of new science and technology allows us to modify, hack and transform our lives into our own personal perfection. We can surgically modify our bodies, build perfect cities, clone our dogs and live in ecological harmony with our environment. With growing cultural pressures to look perfect and live an ideal life, is striving for perfection a positive goal? Or is imperfection what sustains life and creates diversity and difference?

Sydney Contemporary's program presents a showcase of the very best visual art, current trends and emergent practices, as well as the cross-cultural dialogue it inspires with four days of curated exhibitions, ambitious installations, engaging conversations and cutting-edge performances that appeal to collectors and the art-loving public.

This Wild Song celebrates the strong female leaders in the arts community. Coming from varied backgrounds and working in a diverse range of mediums, the featured artists are unified by their unique voices and distinct style.

2018 is the bicentennial of Mary Shelleyâ€™s novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. That her story â€” of a man who generates life through scientific experimentation, is horrified by and rejects his creation, thereby unleashing a string of tragic events â€” would seem so timely after 200 years is remarkable. This exhibition seeks to illustrate through contemporary visual art practice, why the novel continues to be so relevant.

In her most ambitious exhibition to date, globally renowned artist Patricia Piccinini will occupy GOMA’s entire ground floor with a retrospective of her key works and a suite of daring new commissions conceived for the Gallery’s expansive spaces.

Sat 3-Mar-2018 - Sun 3-Jun-20182018 Biennial of Australian Art: Divided WorldsArt Gallery of South Australia, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art at the University of South Australia, JamFactory and Santos Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Garden.North Terrace
Australia

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Art Gallery of South Australia, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art at the University of South Australia, JamFactory and Santos Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Garden. (Australia)

The 2018 Adelaide Biennial
presents an allegory of human society, one that meditates on the
drama of the cosmos and evolution; on the past and the future; and on beauty and the environment.

Exodus heralds a new chapter in the history of The Vivian, as itâ€™s the first show curated by our Director, Scott Lawrie. With a hand-selected group of some of the most outstanding artists working in New Zealand and Australia today

Soft Core presents artistic practices that explore the many facets of â€˜softnessâ€™ - from large-scale inflatables to forms made from soft materials to materials that simply look soft. These artists are making works that demand attention - forms that are not simply bumped into while looking at paintings.

All the better to see you with: Fairy tales transformed, the Ian Potter Museum of Artâ€™s 2017 summer show, traces the genre of the fairy tale, exploring its function in contemporary society.

The exhibition presents contemporary art work alongside a selection of key historical fairy tale books that provide re-interpretations of the classic fairy tales for a 21st-century context, including Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel and The Little Mermaid.

Featuring international and Australian artists, All the better to see you with explores artistsâ€™ use of the fairy tale to express social concerns and anxieties surrounding issues such as the abuse of power, injustice and exploitation.

Fairy tales can comfort and entertain us; they can divert, educate and help shape our sense of the world; they articulate desires and dilemmas, nurture imagination and encapsulate good and evil. All the better to see you withinvites us to delve into this shadowy world of ancient stories through the eyes of a diverse range of artists and art works.

This major summer exhibition is presented across all three levels of the museum and is accompanied by a catalogue and public and education programs.

The ninth edition of the Momentum Biennial takes the notion of alienation as its starting point. By alienation the curators refer to a contemporary world where alien processes and entities are becoming an integrated part of our lives through technological, ecological and social transformations.

The group exhibition Mad Love provides a contemporary image of current Australian art within the context of Germany and Europe. Held at Arndt Art Agency’s premises in Berlin, the show is curated by leading Australian artist Del Kathryn Barton.

The Universe and Art is an artistic voyage through space, exploring where we came from and where we are going.
It weaves a rich constellation of Eastern and Western philosophies, ancient and contemporary art, and science and religion, to explore how humanity has constantly contemplated its presence in the universe.

Sweat, freckles, wrinkles, pores and veins. In a ‘lively’ exhibition, 39 human body sculptures by 31 internationally acclaimed artists have taken up residence at ARKEN. The artworks make use of extreme realism, which imitates the surrounding world with an overwhelming wealth of detail. The bodies are almost more real than reality itself – they are hyperrealistic. Encountering the works, we come exceptionally close to other ‘human beings’, and the experience is both titillating and transgressive.

What is art—and why do we make it?
We want you to look at art without a cultural filter. Art has a basis in biology. It is possibly adaptive—just as your opposable thumb is adaptive, something that helped you survive and to procreate, and to pass your genes into future generations.

Soft Core presents artistic practices that explore the many facets of softness - from large-scale inflatables to forms made from soft materials to materials that simply look soft. These artists are making works that demand attention - forms that are not simply bumped into while looking at paintings.

To bring the issue of genetic mutations to the territory of art, the Australian artist Patricia Piccinini using realism as language, presenting the viewer a universe of unknown creatures, but palpable and surprisingly affectionate. ComCiencia, a neologism that carries a double meaning, connecting conscious and science, offers the public a narrative path between sculptures, drawings, photographs and videos. Curator: Marcello Dantas.

See how contemporary artists interpret things that go vroom across painting, sculpture, photography and more. From Albury's tradition of motorised innovation to modern car culture, SPEED: The Fast and The Curious is where art, technology and our need to always go faster collide.
Featuring newly commissioned works by leading Australian artists, interactive exhibits and works on loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney) White Rabbit Gallery (Sydney), the Laverty Collection and private owners.

A First for Japan: Astronomy Manuscripts Penned by Genius Leonardo da Vinci,
Plus The Latest, Immersive Installation by teamLab That Lets You Experience The Cosmos First Hand!
Mori Art Museum is proud to present “The Universe and Art” from Saturday, July 30, 2016 to Monday, January 9, 2017. Our universe is of perennial interest, appearing in art all around the world as an object of worship and study over the centuries, and spawning countless stories. “The Universe and Art,” in just one exhibition, will offer a diverse selection of around 200 items from across the globe and down the centuries.

In her first solo exhibition on the West Coast, Piccinini will exhibit sculptures, drawings and a single channel video exploring possibilities of genetic variation and modification, the natural versus the unnatural, and love and parenthood. Piccinini raises questions about the most important topics of our time from a surreal perspective somewhere between thought and emotion -- but always from a place of empathy and openheartedness.

Patricia Piccinini's first major solo exhibition in Brazil brings together sculptures, video, photography and drawing from the past 15 years of her practice. The title is a neologism in Portuguese, combining the ideas of science, conscience and consciousness alluding to Piccinini's interest in empathy, ethics and humaness in the contemporary world.

Thomas Olbricht shares his personal take on the large installation Helm/Helmet/Yelmo by Los Carpinteros.
Olbricht has chosen his favourite objects from his astonishingly eclectic collection, in a selection based on highly subjective decisions and personal tastes.

Patricia Piccinini's first major solo exhibition in Brazil brings together sculptures, video, photography and drawing from the past 15 years of her practice. The title is a neologism in Portuguese, combining the ideas of science, conscience and consciousness alluding to Piccinini's interest in empathy, ethics and humaness in the contemporary world.

Materia Prima presents outstanding work at the nexus of art and science but it is also a showcase for the notoriously curious and as such the whole exhibition space serves as an inspiring laboratory environment which in a literal way has a set of visitor labs as its central core. This hybrid form of presentation is a clear commitment to the didactic and inspirational potential of art and science and an expression of our wholehearted believe in the impact that art and science can unfold beyond their own territories and in the power and creative energy which can be derived from the collaboration of art and science.

Patricia Piccinini's first major solo exhibition in Brazil brings together sculptures, video, photography and drawing from the past 15 years of her practice. The title is a neologism in Portuguese, combining the ideas of science, conscience and consciousness alluding to Piccinini's interest in empathy, ethics and humaness in the contemporary world.

Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal presents, in partnership with the Galerie de l'UQAM, Another Life, the first solo show of artist Patricia Piccinini in Canada. In keeping with the theme of this 14th edition of the International Biennial of the Contemporary Image, The Post-Photographic Condition, the exhibition Another Life takes an intriguing and ambivalent look at the relationships between species in a context of genetic tinkering. Through photography, video and sculpture, Piccinini creates a world where humans, animals and monsters coexist and even help each other.

Hosfelt Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent work by Patricia Piccinini this year at ArtInternational. Piccinini creates hyperrealist sculptures that envision transgenic, humanoid constructs—eerily lifelike hybrids that are both repellant and loveable.

Patricia Piccinini is one of Australia's most acclaimed artists who has received worldwide attention for her startling sculptures and digital environments.

Piccinini's work examine the connections between science, nature, art and the environment. She creates an imaginative world peopled with families of charming and slightly unsettling creature; mutants who are half-human and half-beast, baby trucks and humanized scooters who love one another.

Audiences are drawn to Piccinini's work because they appear so real. Her scultptures are familiar yet fantastical, a possible future species from a strange new world.

Piccinini won Australia's National Arts Prize in 2014 following the creation of her spectacular Skywhale which will also be seen in Galway at the Festival. She reperesented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.

Super Natural focuses on historical and contemporary women artists’ unrestrained absorption with nature. Rather than merely document beauty, artists in the exhibition engage with the natural world as a space for exploration and invention.

The title of this exhibition - And colour is their flesh - comes from some remarks from Nicolas Poussin about art; where he likens drawing to the skeleton of what an artist does and colour to its flesh. This idea rings true to me on many levels. Drawing has always been at the core of my practice and these drawings often become something very fleshy. I would say that flesh is very much central to what I do also.

I have wanted for a long time to do an exhibition of drawings and to focus on the process of drawing as a way to explore ideas further. There is a very personal investment in a drawing, an amount of time that cannot be rushed and a real physicality between the artist and the paper.

These drawings are a series of explorations of ideas and aesthetics that currently excite me. They are a space in which I can think about Surrealism, for example, which is as central to my broader practice as realism is. These works are emotional, and funny, free and perhaps a bit obsessive.

There is a number of tropes that I have returned to again and again in my work. The body, obviously; this thing that we all have in common but which also makes us all different to a greater or lesser degree. This fleshiness also joins us to other animals and to the rest of the world. There is also my love of botanical and zoological illustration. I am very interested in hummingbirds, those avian pollinators whose incredible variety symbolises evolution as much their relationship with plants expresses the omnipresence and variety of sexual reproduction.

Hair is a big part of these works, as it has been a big part of my practice forever. There is wild unruly hair. There is elaborately styled hair. There is hair that forms into something else. There is stuff that just looks like hair but isn’t. For me, hair is one of the great symbols because it is so amorphous and can be so many things at once. It is ambiguous but emotive and beautiful. Hair is living but it is not alive. It is sensuous but it has no feelings. Hair is never fixed, we can transform our hair into whatever we choose but at the same time it will always try to return to a tangle. What we do to our hair expresses both our interiority and our relationship to social pressures. Hair is one of these things that is used to divide us but it is also what unites us with all other mammals.

For me, hair in all its manifestations is beautiful to draw. It is the clothes for the amorphous characters I am creating, sometimes it is all there is to give them form. And sometimes that is more than enough.

Figurative sculpture frequently falls along two clearly defined lines; artists who use the medium to explore interiority through an aggressive handling of materials and artists who approach the figure from a more external and presumably cerebral point of view, subtly crafting their work to allow the viewer to arrive at their own conclusions. This tension is frequently framed as “interior vs. exterior”, “romantic vs. classical”, “id vs. super ego” or “open form vs. closed form”, but it is a consistent counterpoint that frequently becomes contentious. Beauty and the Beast looks at this phenomenon by presenting sixteen of the most dynamic and renowned figurative sculptors of our era whose work defines the extremes of these tendencies and many of the subtle permutations in between.
Beauty and the Beast represents the extremes of progressive figurative sculpture today, but the most exciting aspect of the exhibition is found in the unlimited ways that these artists are exploring the subtle permutations between these extremes. This show asks you to examine what craft is, how it can be deployed, what it means to be abject or beautiful and ultimately what it takes to make a genuinely challenging work of art.

me Collectors Room/Olbricht Foundation presents from 7 December 2014 until 30 August 2015 its first ever exhibition dedicated entirely to women artists, in a show entitled ‘QUEENSIZE – Female Artists from the Olbricht Collection’. With close to 60 artists, the exhibition represents a third of all women artists featured in the collection. The some 150 works on display in all manner of media stem from such respected artists as Helene Appel, Louise Bourgeois, Nathalie Djurberg, Marlene Dumas, Klara Kristalova, Sükran Moral, Elizabeth Peyton, Patricia Piccinini, Cindy Sherman, Taryn Simon, and Carolein Smit, to name but a few.

As one of the largest bed sizes, ‘queensize’ serves as the springboard for the exhibition, with the bed seen as a key existential site of human experience, a symbol of death and birth, temptation and eroticism, dreams and nightmares. The selected artists present us with their own distinctive view of human existence and of what makes us uniquely ourselves: our innermost being and innermost needs, our desires and passions. The display investigates the disparities between how we see ourselves and how others see us, and asks whether there really is such a thing as the specifically female view.
The exhibition is curated by Nicola Graef (documentary film producer and director) and Wolfgang Schoppmann (chief curator of the Olbricht Collection).
Children under the age of 18 only in company or with permission of a parent or legal guardian.
Collage Queensize

LIKE US: Patricia Piccinini
29 November 2014 - 22 February 2015
Like Us is a substantial exhibition that highlights the key themes of my practice. The work is often intense, sometimes strange, sometimes beautiful, frequently emotional, accessible yet complex and always looking to create connections with the audience and stimulate thought and discussion.

Like Us invites the viewer to enter a world that is clearly different from the one we live in. It is a world unlike our own but not so far removed from it. It is a world that plays out the implications of the processes and ideas that animate much of contemporary life. It is a reflection of our world, but reshaped by my own personal perceptions. Many of the works reflect on what might come from contemporary research, but it is more ambiguous than didactic. I am inspired by the implications of the science that shows how closely related all earthly life is. I am intrigued by the possibilities and compromises that are tied together when research is put into practice. I am aware of what happens in the space between certainty and reality, where people do the wrong things for all the right reasons. I am not trying to tell people what to think, I am more interested in how they feel, and in offering them a space to reflect for themselves or just to wonder.

Connection and empathy are at the heart of my practice, and at the heart of this exhibition. Many of the works are beings of one sort or another; creatures. The word creature comes from Middle English and means literally ‘something created’. My creatures are just that, imaginary beings that are almost possible. They are not always traditionally beautiful, but they always have a beauty and an honesty within them. They are more vulnerable than threatening. People sometimes find their strangeness off-putting at first, but they usually learn to see past this. The creatures literally appeal to the audience’s empathy, they entreat the viewer to look beyond their strangeness and see the connections. This is the double meaning of the title. ‘Like us’ - the creatures implore; ‘because, deep down, you are just like us.’

This process of connection is led to a certain degree by the other inhabitants of the exhibition, which tend to be children. Many of my works contain different representations of children and infants, who for me embody a number of the key issues. Obviously children directly express the idea of genetics – both natural and artificial – but beyond that they also imply the responsibilities that a creator has to their creations. The innocence and vulnerability of children is powerfully emotive and evokes empathy – their presence softens the hardness of some of the more difficult ideas. The children in my works are young enough to accept the strangeness and difference of my world without difficulty, and they hint at the speed at which the extraordinary becomes commonplace in contemporary society. For me, the clear emotional bonds that connect the children and the creatures in my work are simultaneously optimistic and disturbing. Their closeness is both moving and unsettling.

Like Us is comprised of sculptures, paintings, drawings and video works that approach these issues, and others, from numerous different angles. There are important early works as well as some of my most recent, alongside significant pieces from the last fifteen years. The space has been broken into a series of connected, yet discrete spaces, some large and some more intimate. There is flow from dark to light and the works arranged in a way that emphasises the more unexpected connections between them rather than the obvious. The gallery becomes an immersive world that the viewer enters and moves through, discovering unexpected places and occupants at every turn.

An exhibition exploring new concepts of humanness and finely tuned emotional states through contemporary figurative and portrait-related work. Allowing the subjectivity of the works to resonate, the exhibition will enable audiences to engage with the concerns of the individual artists as well as broader social and personal themes. With a contemporary psychological edge, In the flesh: Portraits from the new real will confront emotional experiences of nurture, vulnerability, self-possession, isolation, acceptance and intimacy. The exhibition will present works in diverse media by artists including Jan Nelson, Natasha Bieniek, Patricia Piccinini, Juan Ford, Petrina Hicks, Ron Mueck, Yanni Floros, Sam Jinks and Robin Eley with further works by Michael Zavros, Sam Leach and other contemporary video artists and photographers yet to be selected.

The project comprises the work of 24 contemporary artists, whose practices reflect a deep engagement with the human body and whose practices articulate a set of key questions, forming the basis of the project’s curatorial investigation.
What is it to be human? What are the constituent elements of the human body? What are the defining parameters between health and disease? As a result of these ambiguities, how do we, or can we expect to define normality?

Swell (2000), a three channel video installation by Patricia Piccinini is presented at Screen Space as the opening exhibition in a continuing series: Topographic Resolutions. This series of exhibitions will present significant video works, all older than 10 years, which incorporate computer-generated images in their production of landscape. Future exhibitions in the series include Nicolas Moulin (25 September - 25 October) and Kelly Richardson (6 November - 6 December).
Topographic Resolutions will be accompanied by a broader program of public forums, talks, screenings, catalogues and exhibitions, which will consider issues related to archiving, collecting and conserving media works within the context of digitisation. Render, curated by Simone Hine (details below), inaugurates this, and is also the first Screen Space exhibition in its new gallery (upstairs), in the former Beam Contemporary gallery space.

This exhibition brings together a group of recent works that all look at the way the body motivates action. Some of the works look at the body’s autonomous functions, the involuntary activities that sit below consciousness or beyond control. Others express more emotional situations, where feelings overwhelm rational will. There is a sense of the irrepressible, a feeling that they can barely contain the forces that dwell within them. This is both wonderful and unsettling, sometimes a joyous fecundity and sometimes an overwhelming outpouring. This is a collection of contrast and ambiguity; strangeness is often countered by an unexpected familiarity. Materials are transformed and situations are revealed to be more complex or simpler than they appear.

Melbourne Now celebrates the latest art, architecture, design, performance and cultural practice to reflect the complex cultural landscape of creative Melbourne. This ambitious and far-reaching exhibition across NGV Australia and NGV International will show how visual artists and creative practitioners have profoundly contributed to creating a place with a unique and dynamic cultural identity.

The exhibition will represent Melbourne as a dynamic centre for the production of, debate about, and participation in contemporary art, architecture, design and performance - innovative creative practice in all its forms. Melbourne Now will encompass an ambitious program with well over 120 artists and projects as well as architectural and design projects and commissions, commissions for kids and families and a community hall, which will host a rotating program, encouraging community expression from choirs, workshops, multicultural groups, performance artists, cake decorators, philosophers and poets, among many other activities, public programs and events.

The exhibition “Myths, memories and mysteries : how artists respond to the past” at The Scottish Historic Building Trust, includes works by 9 Greek artists and four from elsewhere.
The exhibition, curated by Roger Wollen, is presented within the framework of the international conference “Greek laughter and tears in late antiquity and Byzantium: looking all ways”, Never a funeral without a joy, nor a wedding without tears (proverb From Pontos), organized by Dr. Meg. Alexiou, Emeritus Professor of Classics (Harvard University).
Artists: George Hadjimichalis, Dimitris Kontos (1931-1996), Kostas Panagiotakopoulos, Markos Kampanis, Nikos Alexiou (1931-2011), Katerina Samara, Marianne Strapatsakis, Theologos Palaiologos, Manolis Zacharioudakis, Derek Jarman (1942-1994), Tim Croft, June Yun and Patricia Piccinini.
The exhibition will tour to Jarrow and Cambridge.

Under my skin presents a collection of photographs by contemporary Australian artists that challenge a long-held perception in Australian culture that suburbs, and congested urban living, represent mediocrity and consequently a bland life devoid of spontaneity. Instead, many artists recognise the suburb as a complex site: a tangled web of homes and hospitals; service stations and fast food restaurants. It is a playground for popular culture, but equally a place to explore sub-cultures.

Other artists show that inherited suburban anxieties persist. Memories and dreams are pervaded with threats – real or imagined – about what goes on behind closed doors. The domestic sphere is also a space for the weird or the aggressive; the melancholic and the beautiful.
Under my skin is drawn from the collection of Pat Corrigan AM, a generous supporter of contemporary Australian art, and artists include: Bill Henson, Patricia Piccinini, Rosemary Laing, Tracey Moffatt, Shaun Gladwell, Selina Ou, Deborah Paauwe, Darren Siwes, Matthew Sleeth, Mark Kimber, and Petrina Hicks.

Jenkins Johnson Gallery is pleased to present Seven Sisters, a group exhibition opening Thursday, October 3 with a reception from 5:30 to 7:30pm, and running through December 7, 2013. Seven Sisters features ethnically diverse and world-renowned artists’ commentaries on the intersection of ethics, race, culture, and self-expression. Among the hottest young and established artists of today, Seven Sisters includes Carrie Mae Weems, Mickalene Thomas, Rina Banerjee, Patricia Piccinini, Camille Rose Garcia, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Toyin Odutola, and Vanessa Prager.

Patricia Piccinini has been selected as the featured artist in the 9th Kaunas Biennial. The Kaunas Biennial is one of the oldest in eastern Europe.
The 9th Kaunas Biennial UNITEXT will create conditions for immediate collisions of an artwork and a spectator, allowing the experience of art as a universal text. Curators of the exhibition together with artists will pursue a concept that is new and unfamiliar in a cultural context and will consolidate it by presenting practical examples. We will go into the question of a unitext, which is the latest link in work -> text -> intertext -> hypertext -> unitext semiotic chain of a philosophic / art criticism / artistic field.

Scientific achievements of the last years make us read and write on genetic information. Why do we need street lights when we can make trees to lighten our ways? Isn’t it time to awake extincted species back to life or even create new ones? Could we protect ourselves from diseases by sorting our bad DNA? The exhibition opens insights into synthetic biology.

Interview
Matthew Gardiner has put together the artistic works of the exhibition – on the Ars Electronica Blog he talks about the possibilities that are available through synthetic biology and how we will be affected.

A companion exhibition to Christian Houge's photographs, the group show Call of the Wild features work that reflects our primal, tenacious urge to explore the remote corners of the world, and the simultaneous drives to conquer and embrace nature. Artists include Joseph Beuys, Tim Hawkinson, Birgit Jensen, Michael Light, Patricia Piccinini, Alan Rath, Ed Ruscha, Kiki Smith and Helmut Wietz.

Performed at the Rene Block Gallery in New York in 1974, Joseph Beuys' action, "I Like America and America Likes Me," exemplifies the yearning to embrace the savage, untamed, and instinctual. For three days Beuys remained confined in a room, interacting with a live coyote using symbolic props and gestures. The 37-minute film by Helmut Wietz documenting the performance reveals alternating moments of harmonious co-existence and ominous threat between human and animal.

The shadowy image of a tall ship in Ed Ruscha's "Homeward Bound" calls up associations of the golden age of voyage and adventure, while Birgit Jensen's painting, "Sagarmatha," refers to Mt. Everest, the ultimate aspiration of any mountaineer. Both works play on idealized notions of adventure that ignore the likelihood of tragic consequences. Michael Light's FULL MOON series of photographs depicting NASA's first forays into space points to our fierce determination to conquer new frontiers under the most adverse conditions.

Tim Hawkinson's sculpture "Scout" takes the form of the fringed buckskin outfit worn by Davy Crockett in the TV and movie vernacular of the 1960s. Not only does it speak to Hollywood's romanticized notions of exploration, but also to the role of the senses in discovery. Proportioned as a sensory homunculus, Scout is a distorted scale model reflecting the relative number of nerve endings in different parts of the human body.

The work of Patricia Piccinini also deals with the mutant body. Her hyper-realistic sculptures envision transgenic, humanoid constructs - eerily lifelike hybrids that are both repellant and loveable. Like Piccinini, Kiki Smith's works often merge human and animal forms. The combination of woman and wolf is a frequent occurrence, sometimes in altered versions of the story of Little Red Riding Hood as one of harmonious union.

Alan Rath's robotic sculptures made with feathers, speakers, and custom electronics are feats of engineering genius. Their uncannily animate qualities point to our fascination with the power to engineer life itself, as evidenced by continuing advances in biotechnology, and the increasingly blurred boundaries between the natural and the artificial.

The 2013 Children’s Exhibition includes film, painting, sculptural and photographic works by leading Australian contemporary artists. With the motor vehicle providing a central and unifying motif for the exhibition, VRROOOM invites children and their families to explore, discover, engage and interact.

The Wandering: Moving images from the MCA Collection is a touring exhibition showcasing the development of digital video imagery in Australian contemporary art. The artworks range from hand-drawn animations, computer-generated imagery, and video and explores a range of themes, artistic styles, voices, actions and performances by artists working across Australia and internationally. Artists represented include Patricia Piccinini, Vernon Ah Kee, Lauren Brincat, Daniel Crooks, Shaun Gladwell, and Richard Lewer.

This exhibition will bring together a diverse range of contemporary artists, who through their work, confront and challenge our attitudes towards the natural world, and in particular, the animal kingdom.

Humankind has long been fascinated by animals, who in turn, have been subjected to research, collection, categorisation, documentation, display and experimentation. Each of the artists within the exhibition creates works which involve an intensive scrutiny of animals and nature as well as a critical engagement with the ways in which we have attempted to understand and control the natural world.

Haunch of Venison presents the first UK solo exhibition of Australian artist, Patricia Piccinini. This exhibition will include a selection of new large-scale sculptural works. Piccinini’s work encompasses sculpture, photography, video and drawing and examines the increasingly blurred boundary between the artificial and the natural as it appears in contemporary culture.

In November 2012 Heide will present ‘Louise
Bourgeois: Late Works’, a major exhibition assembling
key works from the last fifteen years of Bourgeois’s
career.
Bourgeois was one of the most influential, inventive
and provocative artists of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, and her work continues to define
contemporary art. ‘Late Works’ will focus on
Bourgeois’s use of fabric in her sculpture and what
she termed ‘fabric drawings’.
The works range from surreal to emotionally intense representations of sexuality, human frailty and
Bourgeois’s reflections on fear and the passing of time, such as in the key fabric-drawing suites Dawn (2006)
and The Waking Hours (2007). One of the artist’s major Cells, dominated by one of her famous gargantuan
spiders, is central to the exhibition. Bourgeois created her powerful spider works partly in tribute to her
mother, saying: 'Like a spider, my mother was a weaver … spiders are helpful and protective, just like my
mother'.
‘Louise Bourgeois: Late Works’ is a major undertaking for Heide and is designed to extend our interaction with
this profoundly important artist’s work, and introduce it to new audiences and generations.
This exhibition will also feature work by Australian artists who have been influenced by Bourgeois, among them Patricia Piccinini.

Fairy Tales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination is an exhibition of works by contemporary artists who are inspired by the fantastic stories and characters of myths, fairy tales and science fiction in which the boundaries between human and animal are blurred.

Whether in mythology, fairy tales, or science fiction, these stories and their wondrous characters are often thought of as children's entertainment. But as the artists in this exhibition demonstrate, while the novelty of invented creatures makes them delightful or frightening, they also have a serious dimension; they can cause us to reconsider our notions of what it means to be human. This takes on a new immediacy today, when scientists are able to conceive new species by mixing and matching existing genetic material.
For the artists in this exhibition, the hybrid body- whether imagined or potentially real- expresses hidden desires, ancient fears, the intrigue of transformation and the wonderful irrationality of life's paradoxes. Fairy Tales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination includes approximately 60 paintings, photographs, sculptures and video works by contemporary artists from Canada and around the world, including David Altmejd, the Chapman Brothers, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Patricia Piccinini and Cindy Sherman.

Sun 26-Aug-2012 - Sun 11-Nov-2012BIOS: Concepts of Life in Contemporary SculptureGeorg-Kolbe-MuseumSensburger Allee 25
14055 Berlin
Georg-Kolbe-Museum is located in the former studio-building of the sculptor Georg Kolbe (1877-1947) in Berlin-Westend close to the Olympic Stadium.
Germany

Featuring over thirty works by artists from North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, this multi-media exhibition evokes the musical tradition of “the blues”—bittersweet, yearning for love, for knowledge, for truth, for transformation.

Cited as the most popular color worldwide, blue incites joy and sadness, wonder and nostalgia, vitality and illness, nature and science. While this spectrum of meaning and effect embraces broad polarities, longing and transformation consistently attend contemporary artistic use of blue as mood and hue. Brilliant blue pigment derived from lapis lazuli stones has been prized by artists since Medieval times; Renaissance painters reserved blue to denote divinity; and the blue fabrics featured in 18th and 19th century portraits signaled exalted social or political status. “A quest for the infinite” is how 20th-century French artist Yves Klein described his obsession with the color blue: in 1958 he patented International Klein Blue.

The transformation of everyday materials, experience, and imagery animates this contemporary exploration of the chromatic, sensory, and psychological effects of blue as color and concept. Blue horizons illuminate utopian visions of nature and art in paintings by Hubert Noi Johannesson and Marta Kucsora; blue skies suffuse the dream-like visions in photographs and videos by Pano Pra Manga, Denise Grunstein, Dinh Q Le, Mark Fox, and Alain Declerq; blue is the hue or mood of obsession in works by Elmgreen and Dragset, Slater Bradley, Graham Dolphin, and others; and blue lends existential resonance to meditations on family, adolescence, and aging by Gaela Erwin, Anders Krisar, Pierre Gonnord, Trine Sondergaard, and Alessandra Sanguinetti. Patricia Piccinini’s wall sculpture alludes at once to the evolution of nature and 21st-century technology and the abiding longing to reach new, farther shores: Mare Cognitum—“the sea which has become known”—is the name given by scientists to a lunar sea bed.

“The weight of the world is love,” repeat the three graces featured in Ragnar Kjartansson’s six-hour video, Song. Filmed in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, the neo-classical setting aligns Kjartansson’s contemporary reverie with the ancient Greek ideal of beauty and truth. Here, truth emerges from endurance and idealization, offering a transformative immersion into the blue.

Chromogenic 2012, an exhibition curated by Phillip Virgo and on display in the upper ground floor gallery of Media House, corner of Spencer and Collins Streets, until August 17. The artists featured use chromogenic, or C-type photography, processes to create their prints. Images courtesy of Colour Factory.

Controversy: The power of art explores the social and cultural impact of art through examples that have provoked intense response and controversy.

Beginning with key works that redefined the nature of art itself, including abstract art, Dada and art that provoked public outcry in the history of the Archibald Prize, the exhibition charts the involvement of art with salient social and political issues including social injustice, violence, refugees and the homeless. Controversies over lifestyles and critiques of bourgeois values are considered, alongside the importance of the human body and the volatile re-interpretations that have provoked controversy on several levels, including sexuality, gender and the representation of children in recent art.

This timely exhibition includes works from the late 19th century to the present day and will represent major works by both Australian and international artists working in painting, photography, print-making, video, sculpture, installation and video.

Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination is an exhibition of works by contemporary artists who invent humanlike, animal, or hybrid creatures to symbolize life’s mysteries, desires, and fears. Finding inspiration in sources ranging from Aesop’s Fables to the products of genetic experimentation, the artists in the exhibition examine interactions between nature and humanity in the context of oral and written lore, psychology, ethics, and visions of the future in both science and science fiction. The exhibition will include approximately 60 contemporary paintings, photographs, sculptures, and video works.
This exhibition includes contemporary artworks inspired by fantastic stories in which the boundaries between human and animal are blurred. Whether in mythology, fairy tales, or science fiction, these stories and their wondrous characters are often thought of as children’s entertainment. But as the artists in this exhibition demonstrate, while the novelty of invented creatures makes them delightful or frightening, they also have a serious dimension; they can cause us to reconsider our notions of what it means to be human. This takes on a new immediacy today, when scientists are able to conceive new species by mixing and matching existing genetic material. For the artists in this exhibition, the hybrid body—whether imagined or potentially real—expresses hidden desires, ancient fears, the intrigue of transformation, and the wonderful irrationality of life’s paradoxes.

In recognition of the work and ideas of Donna Haraway, member of the dOCUMENTA (13) Honorary Advisory Committee and renowned feminist theorist, dOCUMENTA(13) presents “The Worldly House” an archive compiled by Tue Greenfort, within the exhibition part of Karlsaue Park that will give visitors the opportunity to think through Haraway’s writings and teachings in the form of artists' materials, texts, books, and videos. As homage to Haraway, the space functions like a concentrated archive of the thoughts that inform the exhibition, and presents multispecies co- evolution as a key position of dOCUMENTA (13).

Nature vs Nurture. This dichotomy – between an individual’s natural features, those antecedent any influences coming from society and education, and what, on the other hand, moulds him and derives from the context in which the individual himself develops – has been the centre of scientific debates for a long time, in particular between the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century, and has produced a large number of studies on the innate or environmental origin of physical and behavioural traits of man. In recent times academics have been turning their attention back to this dichotomy again, mainly in humanistic fields.

The exhibition NATURE VS NURTURE moves from this ample and complex debate to investigate the work of five artists who analyse – though with different techniques and approaches - the scientific method so as to get possession of its assumptions and objectives. But at the same time they examine the consequences – even in politics – that the ideas of evolution and progress may have in the definition of a modern society.

David Casini – whose artistic practice is particularly focused on a careful research of materials – meticulously selects, elaborates and gives new shape to the objects and elements - both natural and artificial, and with a strong symbolic value – of his works. Casini’s installations, which seem to represent his private imagery, are permeated by a light nostalgic feeling and they appear like fragments of a suspended, silent and solitary time. In his recent work Déjà Vu, three vintage mirrors duplicate and dematerialize some objects – both mineral and organic – hanging in front of them thanks to thin brass structures, thus recalling the symbolic value of the mirror as the possibility of the double and establishing a strong emotional tension with the viewer. This tension is mainly given by the constantly changing perspectives from which the viewer can follow this game of visual references.

Venal Muse, the new series of photographs by Mat Collishaw, on display on occasion of this exhibition, starts from a tribute to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. As the French poet’s poems are centred on such themes as decay and erotism, in the same way Collishaw’s flowers, genetically modified, marked by wounds and sores, seem to be suffering from an unstoppable decay which causes the loss of their beauty and seems to be inevitably caused by man. By evoking the atmospheres of the Renaissance studiolo, the artist presents, through these images, a sort of spectacularization of scientific experiments, investigating the seduction exerted by beauty and its corruption.

The research of the Australian artist Patricia Piccinini starts, on the other hand, from a deep interest in such important themes as genetic engineering, bioethics and biotechnologies and it is characterised by the use of different artistic languages, painting, installation and video. Piccinini’s creatures – familiar and disturbing at the same time – are made of silicone, fiberglass, human hair and clothes that make them astonishingly realistic and they play on the register of ambivalence: on the one hand, their appearance and the pose in which the artist seems to have caught them by surprise communicate a feeling of familiarity and closeness, on the other, when the viewer is in front of these weird creatures, he or she cannot but wonder about their origin and if they are aliens or they belong to a future in which – maybe – we all will be living soon.

The artist places the viewer in front of the genetically modified hybrid and – without expressing any judgment or opinion – she urges the viewer to wonder both about the limit and the relationship between the natural and the artificial and about the reaction resulted from meeting something unknown and different.

In his new series of works, Barry Reigate explores the relation between the shape and what is conceptually projected onto it. This investigation is carried out with a highly critical analysis and through the use of simple geometric shapes taken from decontextualized diagrams contained in the questions of children’s school math tests. His paintings are characterized by a language containing repetitions of geometric forms that look back, play on the aspirational ideologies /aesthetics of modernism, but that, at the same time, empty themselves, through, an evacuated kind of brutal ornamentalism. Taking the forms from an academic and translating them to a cultural context, Reigate plays on our cultural assumptions and social-political aspirations as a kind of dormant test that sees former orders collapsing and questioning what that language, the school test, might be still used for. Through the work Reigate teases with ideas around the social-political and plays with the links between social and physical structures, education and labour, culture and play.

By putting her ideas through an ironic but absolutely precise analysis and scientific catalogation, which results in an extremely disciplined, almost obsessive artistic practice (every element is hand-made), the Bolognese artist Sissi creates a paradigm along which she makes experiments that give origin to sculptures, installations and performances strictly linked to her personal past life – but also about universal themes - constantly in search for new places or bodies where to live, proliferate or sprout.

Artists today are depicting animals in their work with remarkable frequency. The exhibition ANIMAL/HUMAN presents a selection of works by contemporary Australian artists that explore our complex, contradictory and sometimes contentious relationship with other species. Their work variously touches on the psychological, ethical, philosophical, scientific and cultural parameters of the relationship. A number of works continue traditions whereby animals are depicted in symbolic or totemic form, are endowed with human qualities, or stand in for the self. Works range from playful to provocative, while others refuse easy categorisation.

Haunch of Venison presents a group show featuring work by Jia Aili, Jitish Kallat, Susanne Kuhn, Justin Mortimer, Patricia Piccinini and Uwe Wittwer.

In this exhibition Haunch of Venison presents Beijing based Chinese artist, Jia Aili for the first time in Europe; Australian artist Patricia Paccinini for the first time in London; and new work by British artist Justin Mortimer for the first time with the gallery.

The Observer includes the work of six international contemporary artists - five painters and one sculptor - who all create art within the realm of figurative realism. Despite the impact of photography, abstraction, film and video, realism and figurative realism continues to be prevalent in contemporary art from around the world. The works on display demonstrate the range of methods used in this genre - from meticulously constructed photo-realist images to looser, more naturalistic work.

The exhibition takes its title from an emblematic work by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini. The Observer, 2010, is a sculpture of a young boy perched precariously on top of an unbalanced stack of chairs that look set to collapse at any moment, a visual metaphor of the world the human race has constructed for itself and the uncertain future it faces. A key theme running through the show is the way in which artists are using figuration to explore a shared sense of crisis, and to create a new iconography of melancholy. The prevalence of melancholic imagery and disturbing themes in the work of these leading figurative artists articulates their perception of a world in turmoil.

Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination is an exhibition of works by contemporary artists who invent humanlike, animal, or hybrid creatures to symbolize life’s mysteries, desires, and fears. Finding inspiration in sources ranging from Aesop’s Fables to the products of genetic experimentation, the artists in the exhibition examine interactions between nature and humanity in the context of oral and written lore, psychology, ethics, and visions of the future in both science and science fiction. The exhibition will include approximately 60 contemporary paintings, photographs, sculptures, and video works.

This exhibition is organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and curated by Frist Center Chief Curator Mark Scala.

Freeze! A diverse selection of works by artists who pursue the narrative possibilities of the photograph as an inherently performative space. These constructed scenes offer socio-political commentary along with poignant insight into the human condition.

A medical doctor and art collector from Essen, Germany, Thomas Olbricht, two years ago set up Me Collectors Room, a contemporary art venue in Berlin which, like La Maison Rouge, hosts temporary exhibitions.
The Olbricht collection, one of the biggest in Germany, comprises in excess of 2,500 works, a selection of which is on permanent show at Me Collectors Room. This is the first time the collection has travelled to France.
The Olbricht collection is remarkable for its scope, as it covers a period of five hundred years from the 16th to the 21st centuries and takes in a huge diversity of media and genres, from engravings by Albrecht Dürer, Martin Schongauer and Francisco de Goya to others by the Chapman brothers; from photographs by Robert Capa to prints by Cindy Sherman and Vic Muniz; from paintings of the Flemish and Italian schools to the work of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Allan McCollum; from Renaissance ivory statuettes to bronzes by Thomas Schütte and wax sculptures by Berlinde de Bruyckere.
Thomas Olbricht’s journey through the history of art is guided by powerful themes. They inform his choices, run throughout the collection, and connect the works despite their different eras, media and statuses.
Death and its representation, vanity, religious faith, war, the fragility and beauty of the female body, and artists’ renderings of the strange and the marvellous, make this a unique and highly disconcerting collection.
One of its most striking objects is the reconstruction of a Kunst und Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities). A Renaissance precursor to the western concept of the museum, these cabinets are a collection of objects intended to further wonderment and knowledge, and an attempt to understand the world and how art, nature and science interrelate.
In Olbricht’s Wunderkammer, organic and mineral matter, intricate miniature anatomical models, unusual measuring and surgical instruments juxtapose artworks, particularly Memento Mori. The skulls and skeletons made indifferently from ivory, walnut shells, wood or coral, whose essential purpose, above and beyond their artistic prowess, is to remind Man of his mortality.
For the past twenty years, Thomas Olbricht has been compiling a collection of contemporary art which he shows alongside this historic collection.

Power of Making celebrates the role of making in our lives by presenting an eclectic selection of over 100 exquisitely crafted objects. Curated by Daniel Charny, the exhibition is a cabinet of curiosities showing works by both amateurs and leading makers from around the world, presenting a range of skills with imaginative and spectacular results.

Fri 23-Sep-2011 - Sat 5-Nov-2011Boundaries ObscuredHaunch of Venison New YorkChelsea
New York
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Haunch of Venison is delighted to present Boundaries Obscured from September 23rd to November 5th 2011, a
group exhibition that will mark the gallery’s inaugural exhibition in its new Chelsea location. The show will
feature new works by artists including Ahmed Alsoudani, Kevin Francis Gray, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Jitish
Kallat, Patricia Piccinini, Peter Saul, Eve Sussman, Günther Uecker and Joana Vasconcelos. Several of the
aforementioned artists will also have solo shows in the new space over the next year.

To mark its 25th anniversary, CCP’s Limited Edition Print fundraiser will be a special exhibition of new photographic work from internationally acclaimed Australian artist, Patricia Piccinini. Piccinini is a longstanding supporter of CCP, having held solo exhibitions at the gallery in 1994 and 2001. The Fitzroy Series will be the artist’s first photographic work in six years.

The exhibition Our Origins considers the human inclination to trace our beginnings beyond recorded history and explores our limited capacity to draw conclusive answers about the meaning of life. Sixteen participating contemporary artists use photography, video, drawing, and sculpture to reflect on natural history from a distinctly human and often humorous point of view. This approach emphasizes questions about the paradoxical nature of human intelligence in a universe that cannot be altogether explained. Where did we come from? How is it that we have come to possess a consciousness and a psyche? What does the future hold? The exhibition does not provide explicit answers to the great, mysterious questions of our universe, but rather confronts, and then ponders, the very idea that such questions might be unanswerable.

An exciting, major new exhibition showcasing the life’s work of leading contemporary Australian artist, Patricia Piccinini - called PATRICIA PICCININI Once upon a time... will be staged at the Art Gallery of South Australia in April 2011.

Premier Rann said, “The Patricia Piccinini exhibition will be the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of this influential Australian artist ever staged. I am delighted to announce it will be unique to Adelaide, showcasing never-before-seen works of art made especially for the exhibition.”

Patricia Piccinini is perhaps best known in Adelaide as the artist behind Big mother; the lifesize silicon sculpture of a genetically-engineered baboon breast-feeding a human baby, which the Art Gallery of South Australia acquired in 2010.

Art Gallery of South Australia Director, Nick Mitzevich said, “Since Big mother was unveiled in February 2010, around 125,000 people have flocked to see her. We’ve been so inspired by the overwhelming public response that we’ve decided to introduce South Australian audiences to the rest of Piccinini’s fantastical creatures and creations.”

People have always been fascinated by images of transformation involving the human body. What does it mean for human beings to transform themselves into “something other than human”? Transformations into animals, imaginary creatures, robots, and cyborgs . . . Transformations by means of plastic surgery, gene manipulation, and organ transplants . . . Along with ecology, a return to the primitive, and research into new human characteristics for future survival, this has recently become a hot topic in contemporary art. Produced in collaboration with anthropologist Shinichi Nakazawa, this exhibition will bring a new perspective to contemporary art, with “art expansions” as its keyword. As a &#12288;cross-disciplinary endeavor, it will traverse fields to present historical artworks, subculture, and archive materials together with contemporary art.

Thu 16-Sep-2010 - Sat 30-Oct-2010Not as we know itHaunch Of Venison New York1230 Avenue of the Americas
Between 48th and 49th Street
20th Floor
New York, NY 10020

T +1 212 259 0000
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Haunch of Venison is pleased to announce an exhibition of new and recent sculptures by celebrated Australian artist Patricia Piccinini.
Piccinini is best known for creating a transgenic menagerie of hype-realistic creatures made of silicone and fiberglass that simultaneously question the implications of new biotechnologies and elicit diverse and often-conflicting emotional responses from the viewer.

Who is normal? And who decides? The exhibition Niet Normaal · Difference on Display departs from a paradox that is becoming increasingly evident in today's society. Do (bio)technological developments indeed offer promising possibilities in terms of diversity or do commerce and global economics tend to exploit new developments in favour of normality and homogeneity? These questions are central to Niet Normaal · Difference on Display. Several phases, platforms and partners form and take part in a larger campaign, Niet Normaal, which will culminate in an ambitious, international art exhibition. Niet Normaal · Difference on Display is visionary and ambitious: the project has a mission, is of high artistic and international quality and also aims to reach a wide audience. The exhibition contains visual art, games, movies and documentary films.

Tier-Werden, Mensch-Werden / Becoming animal, becoming human
The exhibition brings together the positions of international artists who have chosen to focus on the processes of destruction and creation of animal and human identity and thus opened up new ways of looking at both animals and people. It takes the idea of becoming-animal formulated by Deleuze und Guattari in “Mille Plateaux” as a starting point which the curators however then develop and reinterpret. The works shown include ones in which the artist attempts to adopt the perspective of an animal, to break down classificatory boundaries in trans-species performances or to attribute quasi-human qualities to animals.

When Alice steps into wonderland, she steps into a parallel world that is both bewildering and elusive. In her naivety she takes the journey, and with her lack of self-awareness, she surrenders to the surreal events creating a magical world. It is what is hoped will happen in this exhibition: for the viewer to be so absorbed into the world of the artist that the real world seems very far away. This international group exhibition will work with sculpture, installations, paintings and videos to create a world that will excite amazement, combining a poetic world with the dark undertones that remind us that, as with kingdom of the tale, it is not always safe and free.

Curator: Juliana Engberg
This is the first major survey of Patricia Piccinini's works exhibited in Tasmania. In Evolution she takes us on an incredible journey to encounter the possible flora and fauna of our future world.
Patricia has received worldwide attention for her startling sculptures, digital environments and images that compel us to consider an ecology and biology that blend species in the frontier world of experimental technological and biological environments. Her works take us to a post-Darwinian destination populated with fantastical creatures, new communities and bioethical conundrums.

Following the acclaimed Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art series, the Queensland Art Gallery is initiating a major series of contemporary Australian art exhibitions at the Gallery of Modern Art, commencing in November 2008.

‘Contemporary Australia’ will be the most significant regular national statement of contemporary Australian art and will show its extraordinary range, ambition and achievement. As with APT, these exhibitions will be large-scale spectacular projects encompassing art, film and performance.

The first exhibition in this series, ‘Contemporary Australia: Optimism’, explores the rich, broad and complex territory of the possible in Australian life and culture. Optimism is a modern word for a positive attitude towards the world, expressing belief in favourable outcomes and that good will ultimately triumph over evil. Today optimism is more crucial than ever, an act of will and a positive commitment to a better world.

‘Contemporary Australia: Optimism’ will present work by more than 60 emerging, mid-career, and senior Indigenous and non-Indigenous contemporary artists from every state and territory. In keeping with the Gallery’s commitment to cinema, film and the moving image will be in integral component of ‘Contemporary Australia: Optimism’.

This solo exhibition includes a selection of new and recent works, including the Australian premieres of two substantial new figurative sculptures: 'Doubting Thomas' and 'The Long Awaited'. While predominantly sculpture, the exhibition also features the first public presentation of Patricia's latest video work 'The Gathering'.

This solo exhibition of recent sculpture and painting extends Patricia's fascination the intersection of mechanical and organic forms. The show will feature the premiere of 'The Stags', a major new sculpture that follows on from 'Nest' (2006), as well as a selection of completely new paintings and the imposing and amorphous bronze sculpture titled 'The Uprising'.

Bloodline: The Evolution of Form is a thematic group exhibition featuring 15 sculptural works from a diverse selection of artists. The exhibition surveys the plurality of approaches to sculpture and art making: assemblage, the manufactured object, the figure, conceptual and political work, and multi-media installation. Exhibiting artists include major figures such as Rebecca Horn, George Segal, and Bernar Venet; well-known mid-career artists Donald Baechler, Stephen Dean, Tara Donovan, Patricia Piccinini, Jonathan Seliger, and Fred Wilson; and Texas artists Christian Eckart, The Art Guys, and Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher.

In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz School is an exhibition that presents the work of 150 artists and posits that there has been a huge, but unacknowledged art movement taking place in this country for the last 40 years. Since 1994, this ground swelling of lowbrow, surrealistic, pop, figurative, narrative work has coalesced and found a voice in the pages of Juxtapoz magazine published in San Francisco. This rag has become the most widely read art magazine in the US. It is an influencing force on the aspiring artists of Generation Y and the Millenials, who are now enrolling in art schools in numbers never seen before.

“As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for
the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened
myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much
like myself – so like a brother, really – I felt that I had been happy
and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated,
for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large
crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet
me with the cries of hate.”
Albert Camus, The Stranger

Tolarno Galleries will be exhibiting 'Big Mother' by Patricia Piccinini as part of the inaugural Roma Contemporary Art Fair.

Thu 21-Feb-2008 - Sat 22-Mar-2008The place where it actually happensYvon Lambert New York550 W21st St
New York NY 10011
USA

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With this series of recent sculptures, Patricia Piccinini continues her long-standing investigation into the ever more dubious boundary that separates the artificial and the natural. While the artist is most know for her hyper-realistic sculptures of genetically-engineered creatures, these works represent an important and long-standing strand of her practice that is less familiar to a New York audience. These new pieces relate directly to Truck Babies, featured in the 2000 Gwangju and 2001 Berlin Biennales, imagining the extension of ‘biotechnology’ to the point where everyday technologies are given an organic dimension.

In regards to Nest (2006), she states: “This work continues my fascination in the ‘life cycles of technology’. I am interested in exploring the tangled interrelationship between the artificial and the natural by imagining the lives of machines beyond their usual ‘adult’ forms. Nest presents the viewer with a family group of motor scooters: a mother watching over an infant. The work takes its formal inspiration from the depiction of the nobility of animals, which can be seen from the nineteenth century painting to present day documentaries. In doing so, it removes these prosaic vehicles from the industrial processes that usually define them and imagines them as part of the world of ‘wildlife’, making them both more sympathetic and less easy to control.”

To Complement the exhibition Strange Cargo: Contemporary art as a state of encounter Piccinini will talk about her featured installation "Nature's Little Helpers: Surrogate (for the northern hairy nosed wombat)", as well as her career and recent work.

Admission to the artist's talk is free, however seating is limited, and bookings are essential.

Slought Foundation, Philadelphia is pleased to announce the first exhibition of works from the Teutloff Collection, Germany, featuring a selection of international artists whose film and video works examine the varied manifestations of the human body in contemporary society. The exhibition will be on display in the galleries at Slought Foundation from December 19, 2007-February 9, 2008; the opening reception will take place on Saturday, January 19th, 2007 from 6:30-8:30pm. The works featured in this exhibition will be selected by Osvaldo Romberg, Senior Curator at Slought Foundation; a complete list of artists featured is forthcoming in October 2007.

At an early juncture, more than twenty years ago, the German collector Lutz Teutloff began to develop a sensibility marked by a concern for the perpetual transformations that constitute the ‘human’ and the ‘body,' as documented in contemporary photography, film, and video production. The individual works of art in the Teutloff collection, as well as the collection itself, inform and constitute a critical commentary on the ‘condition humaine’ and the momentous changes taking place today. The collection thus exemplifies a thematic approach to collecting art, and it illustrates the ever-increasing fascination with and alterations to the concept of the ‘human’ in this age of technological and cultural transformation. It takes place at a particular moment when the human body is increasingly reduced to a supposedly self-evident and instrumentalized ‘thing’ under the all-pervasive gaze of commerical media and the biological sciences, as well as the body cults and healthcare crazes that predominate amongst the public at large.

This is Patricia Piccinini's first major solo museum exhibition in Spain. The show will feature a wide selection of recent work along with some earlier works to proved a broader understanding of the artist's work.

Global Feminisms, the first major exhibition to explore international feminist art at the turn of the 21st century, will inaugurate a portion of the new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, the first such center in the world. Slated to tour to venues to be announced, the exhibition will be on view in Brooklyn from March 23, 2007 through July 1, 2007. Co-curated by Maura Reilly, Curator of the new Center, and the renowned art historian and feminist scholar Linda Nochlin, the exhibition brings together more than one hundred artists from over fifty countries. A portion of Global Feminisms will also be installed on the fourth floor of the Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, adjacent to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

This is Patricia Piccinini's first solo museum exhibition in the USA. The show will feature a range of recent sculpture, drawings, video and photographs. The exhibition will tour to the Frye Museum, in Seattle Washington.

The identity and character of a Collection are shaped by both history of origin and the context of works within exhibitions, and New to the modern incites unexpected dialogues between artworks that share viewpoints and inspirations rather than periods or styles.

New to the Modern draws on the spectrum of the Heide Collection, reflecting on developments in Australian art and, given the strength of its modernist holdings, the way in which the ideational and formal qualities of modernism continue to inform contemporary practice when seen afresh and interpreted anew. Such comparisons are instructive for an understanding of where we’ve been, but should not indict the past as circumscriptive on the present; new modes of expression are also revealed in this exhibition, notable because they eschew history or offer revelations unlikely in other times or under alternative conditions. In other words, what is new to the modern works in layered and multi-perspectival ways.

While scores of thematic connections are apparent across works in Museum holdings, certain points of conjunction have been selected for their recurrence and present relevance: the mutability of the Australian landscape; shifting perspectives on identity, both individual and cultural; the cyclical return of socio-political concerns; abstraction; and the appurtenances of psychological conditions are all explored. More broadly, timeless themes of allegory, appropriation and the fugitive nature of myths and truths, interleave the works and extend their relevance. In the dialogues conveyed amidst the iconic modernist, abstract and figurative art in New to the Modern are inserted five new works – proposed acquisitions – which augur the Collection’s future.

The Bridgestone Museum of Art is presenting an exhibition of Australian contemporary art as an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Ishibashi Foundation. Featuring 73 works, including two made especially for this show, by 35 artists, “Prism: Contemporary Australian Art” is organized according to different principles than previous exhibitions of Australian art in Japan and is unprecedented in scale and originality of approach. Australia has become very familiar to the Japanese, but our views of Australia may still be quite stereotyped. This year has been designated “2006 Australia-Japan Year of Exchange” and we feel that this is a good opportunity to focus on the cultural identity of Australia as a country, exploring an aspect of Australia not yet well understood by most Japanese.

Australia is a young nation. The history of its settlement by Europeans goes back less than 220 years and it is just about 100 years since it became a nation state. It is also a diverse nation with fluid cultural identities based on the indigenous culture, a history of colonialism, and the development of a multicultural modern state. Artists who reflect on the past, observe the present, and consider the future through these various “prisms” have expressed themselves in a variety of media, including paintings, photographs, DVD works and installations. For artists who live in the diasporic conditions of contemporary times, Australia offers the time and opportunity for critical re-examination of their own identity. Artistic practice resulting from this heightened awareness has much to say, whether subtly or more directly, to a Japanese audience, which belongs to the same age but lives under quite different conditions.

Based on the view that “diversity is the hallmark of contemporary Australia,” we have avoided dividing the exhibition space into specific categories. We invite visitors to enjoy the exhibition and engage in a fruitful dialogue with individual works.

<p>Photography has come to dominate the contemporary art scene but despite the photo rich days we live in, large-scale surveys of Australian photography are relatively rare. Light Sensitive seeks to redress this lack and features a major exhibition of work by early to mid-career Australian photographers. The exhibition comprises 65 photographs by 38 photographers including, Brook Andrew, Patricia Piccinini, Simon Cuthbert, Cherine Fahd, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Simon Obarzanek, Selina Ou and Deborah Paauwe.</p>
<p>Light Sensitive comprises five themes and ranges from the 'uncanny' which includes evocative camera-less images called 'photograms' and surrealist-inspired images; 'new portraiture' which takes a time-honoured subject into fresh creative areas; a distinctive examination of physically (but not psychically) vacant spaces; documentary work that considers reality in provocative ways; and photographs that explore the complex nature of social groupings in our modern world.</p>
<p>All the photographs are part of the NGV's permanent collection and were acquired through a generous donation given by Mrs Loti Smorgon, A.O. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication, featuring an essay by the NGV Senior Curator of Photography, Isobel Crombie, along with extensive biographies.</p>

redefined is the largest exhibition of modern and contemporary art from the Corcoran’s permanent collection since the founding of the museum. It provides an unprecedented opportunity to experience many of the museum’s most important works from the 1950s to the present.